The site is like a 1995 Ford Escort with a 500-horsepower advertising engine under the hood.

Every major website tracks its users as they make their way through the site, but in an analysis completed by the privacy company Abine, one major website stands out for the number and variety of tracking methods used on its site: The Drudge Report.

That's a surprising finding given that the site's appearance hasn't
changed in a decade. In a recent salutary profile, The New York Times' David Carr noted the site had "no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of a mid-'90s manual on HTML." But don't be fooled by Drudge's surface simplicity: When you the visit, up to 27 different tracking technologies from 18 separate companies are deployed. Drudge is like a 1995 Ford Escort with a 500-horsepower advertising engine under the hood.

Drudge uses twice the number of advertising tools as the average site,
according to Abine. And Drudge stands out even among news sites, which Abine CTO
Andrew Sudbury said deploy "a high number of tracking technologies."

Abine created the browser add-on, Do Not Track Plus, which allows users to see the hidden communications between their browsers and data-tracking servers across the web. It provides you with X-ray vision into the advertising ecosystem that's monetizing your visit to a website.

While I'm illustrating the problems of ad tracking with the Drudge
Report here, let me be clear that what they are doing is only different
in degree, not in kind, from what nearly all the national news sites you
visit are doing. I tested other prominent websites using the same methodology we used to look at Drudge. I found The New York Times deployed 10 tracking tools from 7 different companies and The Huffington Post used 19 trackers from 10 companies. The lesson from Drudge is that you can't judge a site's business-side sophistication by the way that it looks on the web.

Drudge Report did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

The Drudge Report's ads are sold by a long-time Internet advertising company called Intermarkets, which was founded in 1997. The site also sells advertising for MichelleMalkin.com, AnnCoulter.com, and the Media Research Center. Even among these sites, there was wide variation in their use of data tracking tools. MichelleMalkin.com only used 17 and AnnCoulter.com just 10

Update*: Intermarkets' hefty response letter, sent this morning, was caught in my spam filter. It's presented here in full. Writing for the company, Michael Loy, chief managing officer, contended that Drudge's data policy "is not materially different from any other websites." Loy also contended -- rightly, I think -- that because DrudgeReport.com does not have social media widgets that track users, it protects its users privacy in a significant way that sites like The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and others do not.

There is a substantive dispute over the nature of the data that passes between your browser and the companies that Drudge works with. There are a number of data exchanges related to ad *bidding and placement* but not behavioral tracking that occur through Drudge's relationship with the Rubicon Project. This data, Intermarkets' Loy says, does not meet the definition that the industry itself has given ad tracking: "the collection of data online... for the purpose of using such
data to deliver advertising to that computer or device based on the preferences or interests
inferred from such Web viewing behaviors."
Note the second clause: the industry does not want to count all data collection in the same way. If it's not explicitly going to be used for behavioral targeting, then they do not consider it ad tracking.

Lastly, as Intermarkets rightly points out: our own media company uses many similar tools, so it is difficult to state definitely who is spreading what data farther or wider. The reality is that we all do this and navigating this terrain is very complicated.

Tracking tools fall into several categories, as discussed in my article last week on the 105 companies tracking me on the web. In some cases, the tracking code is used to serve an ad. In others, it verifies the ad was sold. Still others measure the audience and provide data for ad targeting. And then there are scores of middlemen that gather data and sell ads all over the web, knitting together the various other players.

Reverse engineering exactly what's happening with even a single website's advertising machinery is harder than it sounds. There are an order of magnitude more characters of code on Drudge dedicated to advertising and tracking than there are words for humans on the page, Sudbury told me.

"When you go to Drudge Report, you load a whole bunch of their code.
It's 160,000 characters of Javascript that you're loading," Sudbury told
me. "It reads and sets all kinds of cookies based on what you know and
they already know about you."

Before you know it, 18 companies have been daisychained in. And all this can happen between when you hit enter on Drudge and when the ads show up.

Why are so many tracking tools deployed on the site? It's actually a kind of emergent effect. Basically, Drudge can sell an advertising space to some advertising company, who can, in turn, resell that space to someone else, who again, can resell that space. At each step, the data about who you are has to be passed on down the line, so that prospective advertisers can decide how much they'd like to pay to show you an ad. Before you know it, 18 companies have been daisychained in. And all this can happen between when you hit enter on Drudge and when the ads show up.

We created a document of all the code that is called when your browser heads to DrudgeReport.com. We found tracking technologies from Google, Yahoo, and
Microsoft. In addition, we found several complex scripts from The Rubicon Project, a real-time advertising sales platform. We also discovered tracking by audience research firms like Quantcast, the plain
vanilla ad server AdTech, and advertising marketplaces like OpenX. Every
niche in the online ad ecosystem seemed to be filled.

Intermarkets has a commendably simple and readable privacy policy in which it discloses that it might not only collect its own data on your visits, but will connect its information with other third-party sources. Here is the most relevant snippet:

We may augment our click stream data with non-personally-identifiable behavioral and demographic data from third party Services Providers (defined below) to target and serve some of the advertisements you see on the pages of our Site and those of our Portfolio publishers. This anonymous data may include such things as zip code, age, gender, and income range...

As I noted in a previous article, the online advertising world has a very particular definition of anonymity. What they mean is not that they don't know anything about you. In fact, they know, within reasonable bounds: your probable income, roughly where you live, your gender, your ethnicity, and your age. They pair this data with what you read, so they can sell advertising segments like: roughly 40 year old white men who are interested in gun rights. You are "anonymous" but anonymous in name only; all those tracking companies know whom they are dealing with, even if they can't put a face to the data.

There is another key provision in Intermarkets' privacy policy. Namely, that they do not control what third-parties do with the data they collect on the Drudge Report. "The use and collection of information by our third-party advertising Service Providers is governed by the individual privacy policies of those providers," the policy reads. That means that to truly understand what might happen with the data that your visits to Drudge Report generate, you'd have to read 18 different privacy policies. In addition, as the policy itself notes, not all of Drudge's third-party partners are members of the Network Advertising Initiative, which is the main self-regulatory body for ad firms.

While Drudge Report itself may not do anything strange with your data,
some other company collecting data could sell it to another business
that does, in fact, do something weird. That's one reason that the bare
fact of data collection is problematic, especially as long as
third-parties are able to set privacy policies that users will never
see. Any sort of consumer feedback breaks down when there is this little
transparency.

While there are some obvious differences, the structure of the problem is similar to what we see in the ethical debates about companies' supply chains. Apple, for example, relies on Chinese suppliers, who themselves rely on other suppliers, who themselves rely on even more suppliers. This has the effect of distancing Apple from the primary responsibility for the health and safety of the workers who build their products. In the online advertising ecosystem, Drudge passes responsibility down the daisychain, too.

Among the uses of user data that we do know about, Drudge's commercial partner, Intermarkets, is particularly fascinating because they sell ads primarily on conservative websites. That makes them a particularly good place for Republican campaigns. Intermarkets specifically sells campaign strategy services, including database building. As they explain:

We'll target your specific audience in your district or state based upon demographic, psychographic, and behavioral parameters, using our secure platform, reaching more than 185 million unique U.S. visitors, in a single access point, with unified reporting and campaign management for your convenience.

During the recent health care debate, Intermarkets helped the Senate Conservatives Fund target likely fundraisers and activists right after the House voted to approve the bill.

The boundary between business and politics, between the commercial and civic spheres, is porous.

"SCF launched an ad campaign urging the immediate repeal of the
Government's takeover of health care. Intermarkets' expert knowledge
about conservative websites ensured that SCF was getting their message
in front of the right audience, before anyone else had a chance to
react," a case study on Intermarkets reads. "The results of this campaign were astounding. SCF tripled their
email list in one week, and saw a nearly 200% net ROI. While results
like this are not common, this campaign does demonstrate that working
with Intermarkets provides powerful tools to mobilize American citizens
and identify likely supporters."

The point of laying all this out is that the boundary between business and politics, between the commercial and civic spheres, is porous. The data that can be used to sell you a car can also be used to sell you a candidate. And while some may not worry about targeted advertising for cars, which allows each and every person to remain in his individual filter bubble, it strikes me as something different when all political advertising becomes targeted, too.

Eli Pariser argued in his touchstone book, The Filter Bubble, that the public could be made irrelevant by the increasing personalization of the web. What does it mean to have a public discourse when every demographic and psychographic slice of the country is receiving different information?

The rise of ideologically aligned media helped people sort themselves into different knowledge communities. Sophisticated targeting tools will now reinforce those initial positions, automatically providing ads that have been designed to keep people within the boundaries of the things they once read and thoughts they once had.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.